Tag Archives: light saber

I’m not going to get all poetic here and say we should have cured AIDS or cancer by now. That’s an entirely different conversation. Frankly, there could have been cures a long time ago, but they make too much money on treating the issues instead of curing them, so don’t expect a cure anytime soon.

No, I’m talking about some awesome products or gadgets that we should have had by now. I grew up watching movies where a guy traveled through time in a Delorean, or in a phone booth. I grew up watching the next generation of the Star Trek gang, flying all over and kicking ass.

While these shows kept our dreams guessing if there would ever be a reality for them, sometimes it seems as if they should have already been. This is 2012 dammit! The year the world is supposed to end! And we haven’t come up with these yet? Let’s get a move on it people!

3. Hoverboards
We don’t freakin’ have these yet? Back To The Future Part 2 gave every kid a dream. Much like the Delorean made us all dream of having a super badass car that could travel through time in the first movie, when the second movie came out the only thing every kid could dream of for the next two decades was a hoverboard.

Those Nike's were pretty badass too.

Suddenly, everyone knew someone who knew someone who had one, but nobody ever saw one. And then mind’s started wandering. Was it possible to make one? How would you make it? Blueprints were drawn, prototypes were built, nothing ever came of it.

Naturally, we haven’t made it to 2015 yet, but we’re only three years away and technology is where it is. Thanks for the replica, Mattel, but I want the real thing dammit! And while you’re working on a real one, fix that pesky problem of going over water…

2. Teleportation
Who wouldn’t love to get beamed? I’m not sure what you think of when you hear that, but what I’m talking about is getting teleported from one place to another in the matter of seconds while your body looks glittery. Who doesn’t want to do that?

Can you imagine how awesome it would be to sleep until fifteen minutes before you had to be anywhere and then all of a sudden (Star Trek/Sci/Fi noises) BLAMMO! You’ve teleported yourself to another planet in a fraction of the time a cab would’ve taken.

I'd totally get beamed every night.

The truth is, this one is close. We have the ability to teleport, which we do every time we turn on our TV. Those waves have come from a broadcaster, which sends bajillions of tiny images through the air and then our TV collects those broadcasts and puts them all together and displays it like it’s supposed to be. Unless it’s broke, in which case you should buy a new TV.

Apparently the reason we haven’t teleported ourselves yet is because we don’t want to die. I found this on HowStuffWorks.com:

In 1993, the idea of teleportation moved out of the realm of science fiction and into the world of theoretical possibility. It was then that physicist Charles Bennett and a team of researchers at IBM confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible, but only if the original object being teleported was destroyed. This revelation, first announced by Bennett at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society in March 1993, was followed by a report on his findings in the March 29, 1993 issue of Physical Review Letters. Since that time, experiments using photons have proven that quantum teleportation is in fact possible.

Really cool. So that was almost 20 years ago. Why hasn’t this happened yet? Hurry up people! I got places to go!

1. Light Sabers
I’m not a huge Star Wars fan. I haven’t seen every movie and I would never stand in line at the theaters for days on end, dressed like my favorite character (Jar Jar Binks, of course) just to see a movie on opening day. However, if I said I never wanted a Light Saber, I’d be a lying bastard.

Light Sabers are awesome! Who doesn’t want to carry a tiny little flashlight type object around all the time and then as soon as someone pisses you off you pull it out, turn it on and watch a four foot laser shoot out of the top of it in any one of your favorite retro colors? I know I do!

Pew pew! Wait, wrong noise...

Just how cool would it be if these were real? I mean, it IS 2012 after all.

There are products out there that claim to be real life Light Sabers, but they’re just pocket lasers that you can use to catch anything on fire or kill someone. And they come in cool colors. They do look like the real thing, except they’re not for one crucial element.

The reason we’ll probably never see an actual Light Saber made is, we can’t make a laser stop itself after only going so far. So instead of having a four foot beam shoot out of the handle, it would continue on forever. And if a tiny laser beam is strong enough to start a fire, can you imagine what a beam as wide as a Light Saber’s would do? Especially if it were never ending instead of just four foot long?

It’s pretty safe to say that we’ll never see a Light Saber, but damn how I want one!